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- [00:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to thereestishory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com.
- [00:19]
Tom Holland
This episode is presented by Adobe Express, the quick and easy Create Anything app. Or what does that mean? Well, say you need to make a presentation or a video or a social media post or a flyer, maybe even a video to some, certainly to me that sounds intimidating.
- [00:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
But Tom, with Adobe Express's intuitive features like templates, generative AI and real time collaboration, it has never been easier. Adobe Express Try it for free Search Adobe Express in the App Store at.
- [01:06]
Last the day came when we left Munich to begin the fulfillment of our duty. For the first time I saw the Rhine as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend this, the German stream of streams from the greed of the old enemy. The old watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my heart would burst. And then came a damp, cold night in Flanders, through which we marched in silence. And when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads. But even before the little cloud had passed from 200 throats, the first hurrah rose to meet the messenger of death. Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began. And with feverish eyes, each one of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly, past fields and hedges, the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company. And just as death plunged a busy hand into our ranks, the song reached us too, and we passed it along. Deutschland, Deutschland. So I think a very moving passage there. A private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment remembering his first brush with the enemy in the autumn of 1914, leaving the Rhine behind, coming up to the the mud and the slaughter of Flanders. And anyone who finds themselves at this point brushing away a tear from the eye may be stunned to realize that they've been listening to literally the worst man in history, because that comes from Mein Kampf by a certain a Hitler. Dominic, the Hitler here is. I mean, he's relatively speaking behaving himself, isn't he?
- [03:24]
He's.
- [03:24]
He's actually articulating there the experiences and the feelings of a lot of Germans, and not in a necessarily sinister way.
- [03:33]
No, you're absolutely right, Tom. He's a young man who is enthused with the camaraderie and the patriotic commitment that so many Germans took into the First World War. And the story he tells there, which is young men advancing into enemy fire their first time they're singing the Deutschlandied, the song of the Germans. That story became at this point a central element of German patriotic mythology. So the people who first read Mein Kampf in the middle of the 1920s, they were already very familiar with this story and the idea became wrapped up with something called the Kindermorte, the Massacre of the Innocents. The idea that there's a generation of young men who, at this particular moment in the autumn of 1914 at Ypres, they walked into battle singing their patriotic hymns. And in some versions of the story, the hymn carries them to victory. In other versions, they are cut down as they walk by British machine gun fire. They are sacrificing everything for their beloved fatherland. And they're almost walking willingly with a song on their lips, with their patriotic spirit in their hearts, with a kind of Viking spirit almost. You know, we've done so many stories on the show about the Vikings kind of going into battle, singing. So at the time it was a very compelling and seductive idea. Tom, are you seduced by it?
- [04:58]
Well, I mean, I think of the parallels with the British who were facing the Germans in this stretch of Flanders, but they have very similar stories, don't they? The idea of doomed youth, sacrifice, all of that framed in different ways.
- [05:11]
A long way to Tipperary is someone that took off in the final months of 1914. Now it's all the more powerful, I think, this story, because it's set against the backdrop of one of the most compelling battles of the war, which is the first battle of Ypres. A story full of many most extraordinary feats of kind of courage and sacrifice. And we'll be covering some of those today. So we'll come back to the singing a little bit later. But first of all, let's remind ourselves where we got to. The Germans were pushed back from Paris in the Battle of the Marne at the beginning of September. Their commander, Helmut von Moltke had a breakdown and was replaced by the acerbic Chile Prussian War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn. The Germans have fallen back behind the River Aisne. They have started to dig in to carve out the first trench networks. And then there has been the so called race to the sea. Both sides rushing northwards try to get into the last open bit of territory between the trenches and the English Channel. And the goal is break through this stretch of territory before your enemy can dig in, because then you can outflank him and strike down into his rear. And by the middle of October, this race has really narrowed to a small expanse of the front, the 20 miles that stretch south from the Channel. And there are lots of other battles, so there's a thing called the Battle of the Yser, where the Belgians really distinguish themselves. But today we're going to look at one single point, probably the most celebrated or contested point on the front, which is the town of Ypres. So Ypres, mentioned by the Romans, we don't know what it was called, but they mentioned a town in this place, and it's a very old town. It was a big cloth town in the Middle Ages. It's mentioned in the Canterbury Tales, Tom. And it was the third biggest town in Flanders after Ghent and Bruges in its heyday. And the symbol of Ypres importance and its wealth, that they have this spectacular Gothic cloth hall, built in the 13th century at the time as one of the largest commercial buildings in Europe. And Ypres had changed hands many times. It had been besieged by the English in 1383, captured by Louis XIV in 1678, captured again by the French in the French Revolutionary wars in 1794. And this time, it's the Germans who want it. Falkenhayn's plan is that we take Ypres. It's the perfect base from which to strike, west to the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. And if we can take them, we can cut the supply lines from Britain to the British Expeditionary Force, we can cut the links between Britain and France, and that would be a great step towards winning the war. So he's going to use two armies, the fourth and the sixth German Armies, basically, to batter their way through. And in their path stand the French 8th army and the British Expeditionary Force. So the British first march into Ypres on the 14th of October, and this is the seventh division. And this has been cobbled together from across the British Empire. They've just landed from England as reinforcements. So this is the first time they've been to Belgium, these guys, and they think Ypres is lovely. One officer writes home and he says, ypres, rather a nice old town with narrow cobblestone streets, some fine buildings, and a tremendous lot of priests and nuns. It seems so odd to be fighting in this sort of country, because, of course, they've come from the Empire, they've been fighting overseas, and they have absolutely no sense of the slaughter that lies ahead for them. Now, I'm sorry to report that Sir John French, the florid commander of the bef, has not learned his lesson from previous expeditions to Belgium.
- [08:36]
Oh, that's a shame, because he behaved quite well at the Battle of the Marne, didn't he?
- [08:40]
He did, but now unfortunately. So they advance into Flanders and they say, are there going to be some Germans? And he says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there'll be no Germans here. I think it's fair to say Sir John French is the. He'd make an excellent pundit on the rest politics with his grasp of prognostication. So on the advice of the Rory Stewart of the British expeditionary force, the 7th Division head east out of the town. And actually at first they say, well, you know, this is actually going to be quite boring. We're getting fed up of all this waiting. A gunner writes, we're anxious to get into action. So out they go into the celebrated Flanders fields. So anybody who's done war poetry, all of our British listeners surely will have done war poetry when they were at school because it's such a staple of the curriculum. It's all kind of a great moonscape of craters. It's kind of Tolkien's Mordor or something. But actually it's not like that at the time at all.
- [09:37]
Are there lots of poppies?
- [09:38]
There are poppies, there's loads of poppies. But at this point they're not identified with the war, of course. So there's an Australian writer called Paul Hamm, he wrote a brilliant book about 1914 and he describes it very nicely. He says, the bleak, rain drenched land of gentle hills and ridges, fields of tobacco and beetroot interspersed with hedgerows and barns, spreading into dreary plains seasonally strewn with poppies. They go out into this farmland for about five or six miles. On Sunday the 18th, they have their first skirmishes with German patrols, but they still don't really know what lies ahead. And Sir John French says, just keep going. The next village is called Passchendaele. I'm sure that's an absolutely delightful place.
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Definitely never be a battle there.
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Exactly. The Hun is running out of men, there'll be nobody there.
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And look at all those poppies. We'll never need to use them as a symbol for the futility of war.
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So John French, with his unerring ability to completely mispredict what's happening. The Germans are actually advancing with 14 infantry divisions.
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Of course they are.
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The French have only seven. The Germans are much fresher. They have their fresh troops, they have twice as many guns, they've got 10 times as much heavy artillery. So textbook Sir John French advice there. On 19 October, the Royal Flying Corps head east over the fields and they come back with bombshell news. They say there are actually loads of Germans and they're only hours away. So the British fall back a little bit.
- [11:02]
Okay, so this time John French does actually believe what he's being told, because previously at Mons, the Air Force had been up and come back and he said, oh, nonsense. So to that extent, he is learning.
- [11:12]
I wonder if there's an element, though, of people no longer listening to Sir John French. I mean, certainly I would, if I was one of his officers, I would be skeptical if he advised me of anything. Anyway, the British fallback and they established themselves on a ridge just east of. And this is the genesis of something that, you know, if you read books about the First World War, it's always there. It's called the EEP Salient. So a salience is basically just a bulge in your line, sort of bulging outwards, sticks out, sticks out. It's. It's good news because you can sort of maybe penetrate into the enemy lines. It's also bad news because it means they can surround you on three sides and kind of pour fire into you. This salient is going to play a massive part in the British wartime experience. So the next four years, the British are going to expend 200,000 lives to defend this relatively small patch of land. On 20 October, the Germans launch their assault. These great gray columns advancing relentlessly towards the salient. The Germans attack very bravely, actually. These guys are new. They are barely trained reservists.
- [12:11]
Is Hitler in their ranks?
- [12:13]
He's not at this point. No, I don't think he's waiting in reserve. He's waiting the reserve. But there are very heavy casualties, but the Germans don't break through now. Meanwhile, the British have been told, dig in, hold the line. None of them have really proper spades. Some of them have kind of trowels and stuff. But a lot of them are actually digging into the clay of the fields. So these aren't chalk, they're clay. They're digging with their bare hands. And these are the origins of the Ypres trenches. The next Stage is the 21st. Loads of reinforcements start to arrive, wave upon wave of Germans. But also the first British troops who've got come from the Battle of the Aisne, further to the sort of southwest. And now the struggle for Ypres really begins in earnest. So for the next three weeks, the story is basically the British defending the salient. These are sort of Flemish villages, Zandvoorde, Zonnebecke, Langemarck. Places that if you've ever been to the Western Front, you'll probably recognize. And the Germans just battering away mercilessly, trying to kind of break through. It's very confused, bloody hand to hand fighting. There's shells raining down, there's machine guns bl away all the time. The Germans, time after time, come really close to breaking through, but always, somehow, the British are able to push them back.
- [13:25]
Dominique, is there the crump of guns?
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I think there is. Is it a crump or is it a dull thud?
- [13:30]
I think it's a crump because I think you're obliged by law when describing the Western Front to use the word crump.
- [13:36]
It's very much kind of Wilfred Owen kind of territory. Now all the time the bodies are piling up, especially I have to say, the Germans. So the Germans officers are hurling them forward in these kind of incredibly brave, suicidal assaults. And actually for the British, we always think of all the British, the victims and all this. But the British, they say it's like being in a shooting gallery, truly like.
- [13:55]
A pheasant shoot of the kind that Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser and George V and everybody enjoyed.
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Well, remember they. Because Franz Ferdinand was unfortunately killed, they missed out on that brilliant weekend that they were going to have together.
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But for British sportsmen, this is, I mean, you know, shoot a German rather than a pheasant. It must be the attitude.
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Well, since you do the voice of a well educated British sportsman, say, well, Tom, perhaps you'd like to read to everybody what Captain Henry Dillon wrote to his parents. I mean, imagine writing this to your parents about a German night attack on 24 October.
- [14:25]
The Great Grey mass of humanity was charging straight onto US not 50 yards off as I fired my rifle. The rest all went off almost simultaneously. I have never shot so much in such a short time. My right hand is one huge bruise from banging the bolt up and down. The firing died down and out of the darkness a great moan came. People with their arms and legs off, trying to crawl away. Others who could not move, gasping out their last moments with the cold night wind biting into their broken bodies and the lurid red glare of a farmhouse showing up clumps of grey devils killed by the men on my left, further down, a weird, awful scene. So a hideous shooting party.
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A hideous shooting party. And weirdly, that he would. That he would write to his parents about it anyway. Different times now. For the Germans, it's an indescribable horror. So Max Hastings quotes this bloke from Wurttemberg called Paul Hobb. He's been fighting for a village called Ghelluvelt, which we'll come back to. And he writes to his wife and he says, my dear Maria, I've lived through such horror recently. No words can describe it. Every day the fighting gets fiercer and there's still no end in sight. Our blood is flowing in torrents all around me. The most gruesome devastation. I didn't think war would be like this.
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And there must be a lot of people who are thinking that by this point.
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Oh yeah, yeah, those. I mean, basically everybody at this point says, this is definitely not what we signed up for. This is a new kind of warfare. Machine guns, shells, mud, rain, barbed wire. This is not the sort of romantic adventure that I had dreamed of as a boy or anything like that. On 30 October, the German offensive reaches a crescendo. Falkenhayn has now brought in a new army group, new troops, hundreds of heavy guns and howitzers. The Germans now have a two to one advantage. The classic sort of Western Front scene. The bombardment starts at dawn, an absolute kind of storm of shellfire. Then at 6:30, the German infantry go in. Slowly but surely, it seems like they're going to break through. They take the chateau at Zandvoorde, they drive back the Household Cavalry. But as always, this is the absolute story of the Western Front. Halfway through the day, it looks like they're going to win. And then their offensive falters, they run out of steam and somehow the British are able to hold out and push them back. And that night the German commanders are told, well, you just do the same again the next day, do it again tomorrow. And one of them says to his colonel, he says, excuse me, Herr Oberst, the word battalion has been mentioned. We in Sacento no longer have a battalion. The men have been in battle for 48 hours and they have had no sleep for three nights. In other words, we're falling apart. And the colonel goes ballistic and he says, do you say impossible? There is no such thing as impossible. We're all soldiers. We must accept the risk of death. And so it is on the 31st of October, it starts all over again. And the military historian JP Harris says, this is one of the most critical days, fighting not merely of 1914, but of the entire war. Because the British at this point are really on their last legs. A decade or so later, the official historian of the British Expeditionary Force famously said they were a thin line of tired, haggard and unshaven men, unwashed, plastered with mud, many and little more than rags, all that stood between the British Empire and ruin. So again, another relentless barrage and then in come all these waves of the kind of gray German uniforms. And this time the epicenter of it is this village called Ghelluvelt. And there's so many Germans that they're pretty much irresistible. And by about 12:30 they have forced pretty much all the British troops to fall back. There's just one unit left and that's the first South Wales borderers who are defending the chateau at Galuvelt under overwhelming fire. And their colonel, who's called Henry Burley Leach, he sent a message and he says, I desperately need help because Galuvelt is lost. Now, at this point, this is probably as close as the British ever came on the Western Front to complete panic and disintegration. Later on, years after the war, the corps commander, who was called Douglas Haig, he later told George V, he said, I remember the crowds of fugitives who came back down the Menin Road having thrown away everything they could, including their rifles and packs in order to escape, with a look of absolute terror on their faces such as I have never before seen on any human being's face. So it looks like the British are going to collapse and the corps goes out. We need reinforcements desperately and there's only one unit held in reserve that can get there, and they are the Second Worcesters. And the Worcesters are kind of your classic old fashioned county regiment, you know, sort of men with mustaches, all this. There are fewer than 400 of them. They'd fought very bravely a few days earlier, so they've been told they're going to be resting, they're not being put into the line. As one of them later said, they're dog tired, cold, wet, plastered with mud, they haven't washed or shaved for days. And at one o' clock they're told, actually, you know what, you're not resting, we need you. They're brought forward to the front line, they're given some rum and some stew and they're told, you have to fight to the chateau. Maybe the South Wales borders are still there, maybe they're not. But basically if they are, you've got to save them, you've got to get to this chateau. And it's a terrifying prospect because they have to cross these open fields, they have to cross a stream. They're under enemy shellfire, there's no cover. They've got to get to the chateau and save the British Empire, these 400 blokes. So at 145 they fix their bayonets and their major, who's called Edward Hankey, says, come on lads, let's just go for it. So they charge across this field. There's horrendous German fire coming at them. About a hundred of them are hit, killed or wounded. The rest of them just keep going. They go over this stream, they go over a railway line, they go over some hedges and then they're through a wire fence. And then, and I quote, we cut through it as best we could. At length, the chateau grounds and there was the Hun, right enough. But we had surprised him, he hadn't seen us coming. There was a cheer and we charged. And that's not me talking, Tom, it's Captain Boucher Campbell, Senhouse Clark. Great name, great guy. So the Germans are swept from the field because they weren't expecting these blokes to turn up. Major Hankey, of course, blows his, his hunting horn and the South Wales Borderers who've been there all the time, holding out in the chateau. They emerge from the chateau, Hurrah. Great scenes. And then I think one of the great moments in all history. Major Hankey realizes that Colonel Leach is an old friend of his from his hunting days and he says, well, they've been to, I think one of them had been to Eton and the other had been to Uppingham. But they'd surely played each other well.
- [21:12]
Maybe gone fox hunting.
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Maybe they'd gone fox hunting. Exactly. Anyway, Major Hankey holds out his hand to Colonel Leach and he says the most British thing in history, he says, my God, fancy meeting you here. So it's a great victory, Tom, I'm happy to say, for our historic public schools, but also it's a great victory for the British Empire because the really outstanding figure of the day, 31st of October 1914, is a machine gunner who was stationed in the nearby village of Hollebeke. Now he was part of a six man unit and they'd come under unrelenting fire. He was hit in the arm, he was hit in the leg, but he kept on fighting. His sergeant was killed, the four other men in the unit were killed. So now it's just him and he's surrounded by the lifeless bodies of his mates. He fights on. He's in danger of being overrun by the Germans. So at the last minute he disables the gun and he crawls away to safety under German fire. And this bloke's name was Khudadad Khan and he'd been born in 1888 in the Punjab, which was then British India, now Pakistan. He'd enlisted in the Duke of Connaught's own Baluchis in August 1914, and he's one of one and a half million Indians and indeed 400,000 Muslims who fought for Britain. And after this battle, Qudrat Khan was shipped home to Brighton, where the Brighton Pavilion had been converted into a hospital for the Indian army.
- [22:40]
Was that because they thought that the Brighton Pavilion would remind the Indian troops of India?
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Do you know? I don't know. I've often wondered that. Surely, surely must have played a part. I mean, it's a very convenient building, but surely it must have played a part. And the Brighton Pavilion, I think it had different sections for kind of Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and whatnot. It was all very carefully kind of planned. Anyway, when this bloke recovered, he was invited to Buckingham palace to receive the Victoria Cross from George V and he was the first Muslim ever to win it.
- [23:13]
Heroic stuff from Khudad Ad Khan, from the Worcesters, from their comrades, from the guy with the hunting horn, the whole set. And the drama is that I'm guessing the British hold on, that they. They maintain the. The Ypres salient, whether it's a triangle or a square or a circle. We haven't absolutely decided, but we've definitely decided that tremendous heroism has been shown and that's the key thing.
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But.
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But Dominic, I'm guessing the Germans haven't given up.
- [23:41]
No. And after the break, Tom, they will make another attempt.
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They will throw the dice one last time.
- [23:52]
This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?
- [24:00]
Tom Holland
We all need that sometimes. And Uber knows it.
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
Like for your long distance friends, bringing soup when they're sick, sending flowers when.
- [24:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
They'Re down, when it really matters, whatever it is, you show up where there's a will.
- [24:21]
Tom Holland
We're on our way. Uber on our way. Download the app today. This episode is brought to you by by the Folio Society.
- [24:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Now, Thomas, you know, in the Middle Ages, it could take you years if you're a monk. To create a manuscript, you'd have to copy it out word by word. And then after all that, the margins would be ready and you'd put all kind of decorative elements and all kinds of guilt and stuff in the margins and it would look fantastic.
- [24:49]
Tom Holland
So it might take often years to finish, but the finished product would then last for centuries. And that is pretty much what the Folio Society does today, only, of course, with slightly less parchment and fewer quills.
- [25:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, the Folio Society takes some of the greatest works ever written. Things like George Orwell's 1984 or the quests in JRR Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune. And their team of editors and designers and artisans, they craft books that are so beautiful, they're like works of art in their own right.
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Tom Holland
So each one is carefully designed with slip cases, award winning illustrations and covers that honor the stories inside. It doesn't just protect them.
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
Explore the world's most loved stories in the most beautiful form. Only@folioSociety.com that is.
- [25:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
Foliosociety.com.
- [25:59]
Welcome back to the Rest Is History. Dominic. As ever, we left listeners on a cliffhanger. The Germans are about to roll the dice again. How do the dice fall?
- [26:09]
So we're now into November. The weather has definitely turned. It's pouring with rain, it's very cold. The trenches are kind of knee deep in mud. And on the 5th of November, Germany's supreme commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, says, one more go and he orders a new wave of assaults on the Ypres salient. And they're battering again and again away at these lines with a colossal loss of life. Both sides now are really running on empty. The frontline officers are begging all the time. My men need to rest. You know, there's a real weariness to it and a sense of if there was any last vestige of romance about this, it has long since disappeared. So Max Hastings tells the story of the German 143rd Infantry. They went down the Menin Road, this, this sort of crucial road with their regimental band playing Deutschland Uber Alles song that we began with. And British fire ripped into them. Lots of the musicians were killed and they were forced backwards. And when they got back, the band were all ordered, hand over your instruments, you won't be using those again. And they were told, you know, your days of, you know, blowing trumpets are over. You have to retrain as stretcher bearers. And as Max Hastings says, it feels like a very symbolic moment, kind of handing over your trumpet and Being given a stretcher through a couple more days of punishing assaults on the 10th and the 11th. Falkenhayn's last attempt, really, a massive artillery bombardment. Yet again. He throws thousands of men down this Menin Road. A couple of places the Germans briefly break through, but the British are able to sort of plug the gaps again. There are countless kind of really haunting stories. So one of them is, there's a guy called William Holbrook, who's a corporal in the Royal Fusiliers, and his platoon were pinned down in no Man's Land, and at one point he said, a German officer crawled out of the bushes and said, in perfect English, I am wounded. And the Fusiliers lieutenant shouted, great banter. He shouted, you shouldn't make these bloody attacks, then you wouldn't get wounded. And everybody laughs. And then a bullet smacks into the lieutenant's head and blows it off. So they're not laughing now. And later, Holbrooke crawls into a crater, a shell crater, for cover, and in it he finds a German wounded German soldier who begs him for water. IN German Holbrook gives him some water. The bloke drinks this water and it just pours out of a hole in his side. And the German holds up three fingers and he says to Holbrooke, kleine Kinder, meaning, I've got three small children. And then Holbrooke just sits with him until this bloke dies. And then when darkness falls, he crawls back to the British lines. And there are loads of stories like this. Anyway, this day ends like all the others. The Germans almost break through, but they haven't quite. And by now both sides have run out of shells and the men just can't go on. And the weather is now so awful, howling winds, blizzards of snow, that mass assaults are just completely unrealistic. And the fighting sort of drags on in a very desultory way until about 25 November, when Falkenhayn says he issues an order to German forces in the west. Okay, we're done for the year. Hold your ground, dig in, and we'll wait until the thaw comes in the new year.
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By this point, have both the Germans and the French and the British dug trenches all the way to the coast?
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Yes, the trench lines now are complete. So they run from the coast effectively all the way down to the Swiss border. I know you, of course, Tom would go through Switzerland. Yes.
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The unimaginative German High Command have failed to seize that opportunity.
- [29:41]
They have failed to seize it. So Ypres has been a victory for the Allies, no question. They've kept Ypres, although it's been completely reduced to rubble, the cloth hall in ruins, whatever. They've kept the Channel ports, they've kept this salient to the east, although this is now means it's going to come for the next four years under unrelenting fire from the German guns.
- [30:01]
And presumably already by this point, it's just mud.
- [30:04]
Yeah, exactly. Been churned up into nothing. But the cost is enormous. So out of 160,000 men that the British had, they've lost about 60,000 killed, wounded and missing. So that's a casualty rate of more than 30%. Unsustainable in the long run. The Belgians have lost a third of their army. The French at Ypres alone have lost 50,000 men. And the German losses at Ypres, they lost 140,000 men at Ypres, most of them wounded or missing, but 25,000.
- [30:32]
And that's because they're the ones doing the attacking.
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They're the ones doing the attacking. The attacking is what gets you. And this is obviously just a fraction of the total death toll. So to give you a sense, the British in four months. And don't forget, the British are by far the smallest army. They have lost 90,000 men killed, wounded and captured. So many officers, it's often, you know, this thing about lions led by donkeys, it's actually the officers who take most of the casualties because they're leading from the front. So so many officers from Aristocr families have died, 47 people have died, who were heirs to aristocratic titles, that John Buchan said that reading the casualty lists in the Times was like scanning the death roll after Agincourt or Flodden. In other words, the flower of the nobility has been destroyed. And in fact, the bef, generally, the old BEF that had sailed to France and that, you know, they'd been kind of joshing with people at railway stations and accepting gifts of flowers. That's pretty much been destroyed. You know, huge numbers of those men have been killed or wounded. And so, at home, Kitchener, the war minister, is now raising what becomes imaginatively to be called the New army, but.
- [31:41]
Not the New Model Army.
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Not the New Model Army. That would have been a great name.
- [31:44]
And so this is when his recruiting poster starts to go up and.
- [31:47]
Exactly. So there's a huge recruitment drive now, but of course, that's Britain. But for the French and the Germans, the casualties are far higher. Each of those combatants has lost about half a million men killed, wounded or captured. And for the Germans, who were particularly keen to get this done and dusted quickly because they're so anxious about the Allied manpower advantage, obviously the Russians, this is particularly worrying. And so this, I think, starts to explain the story we began with the young men singing as they go into battle. This idea of the Kindermort, the. The death of the children. So in. In Britain, it's usually translated as the Massacre of the innocents. Tom, you'll know all about this. This is your bailiwick. Biblical massacres. Yes.
- [32:34]
The children being massacred on the orders of Herod, which we talked about in our episode on the origins of the blood libel.
- [32:40]
Exactly. So I guess you could call this a meme, a cultural artifact that goes through loads of different variations as it spreads, and it spreads in the last days of the battle of Ypres, and then it gathers momentum and by the time Hitler borrowed it, so he's writing mein Kampf in 1924. At that point, he's basically ripping it off because it was familiar to every thinking German. It's become a hallowed part of their national wartime mythology.
- [33:04]
And so what's the thinking? Is Hitler making. I mean, is Hitler's reminiscences authentic, or is he moulding them to suit the form of the myth, or what's going on?
- [33:15]
I think there probably is an element of authenticity in them, actually. I think he's undoubtedly molding them as people do. But as we will see, a lot of German historians now hate this story, and they say this story is pure. It's sinister propaganda. But as we will see, there is a definite element of truth to it. So the most common version of the meme is that the date is given as the 10th of November, and it's heavy fog and a German unit is advancing on the village of Langemarck. And these are student volunteers, so the story goes. They're so young that their comrades have nicknamed them the Children's Corps. And they're advancing through the fog and the British open fire at them, scything through their ranks. The survivors, these young lads, drop to the ground, they're paralyzed with fear. Then one of them starts to sing, Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles. And then another joins in, and then another. And then as one, they get up and they start to run at the enemy trenches, ignoring the enemy fire. A lot of them lost their helmets, but they don't care, they just keep going. One account says they are like unreal figures from an old saga. And some versions, they storm the British trenches, but more typically, they're shot down one by one and the song finally fades away. And so you can sort of see why, you know, a nation raised on Richard Wagner and inspiring stories of Teutonic knights are going to love this story.
- [34:38]
I mean, what's interesting about it, it prefigures what is what in Britain is probably the most famous myth that arises from the first world of the lot, which is the Christmas truce. And again there is that idea of a lone voice starting to sing a song, then other voices picking up then. And then this is a story of peace rather than of war. But again, there is the thing that at the end the singing fades away and the guns start firing again and it has the same kind of rhythm, doesn't it?
- [35:06]
That hadn't occurred to me actually, but I think that's a really good point. So it's very tempting to say, well, this is obviously made up, it's obviously pure propaganda, but actually there's a guy called Robert Cowley who's done brilliant detective work on this and I commend his article on the Military History Quarterly. So in this article he traces this story to an official a German army bulletin, which was printed the next day, the 11th of November, and ended up on loads of newspaper front pages. And the newspaper story said, west of Langemarck, youthful regiments stormed the first lines of the enemy trenches and took them singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles. Now, actually, as he points out, we know this didn't happen. No volunteer units captured Allied trenches at Langemarck that day. So that's why a lot of German historians now, and you can completely see why they dismiss this whole story and they say this is a nationalistic fantasy, it's a pre figuring of Nazism, blah, blah, blah. But actually, Cowley says, you know what, there are loads of Allied accounts of Germans singing as they go into battle. There's one at Zonnebecker in 21 October, a British soldier says, Germans came at us singing, waving their rifles. We shot them down, but they were incredibly brave. The next day, 22nd of October, the Gloucestershires, they fought a German volunteer unit. They advanced with the utmost determination, singing patriotic songs and suffered appalling casualties. And there are two accounts by a French colonel called Henri Colin near a place called Bichoote, he says, first of all, a load of Germans advanced singing and we drove them off. They left a great number of corpses. And then on the 16th of October, and I quote, the young German recruits advanced shoulder to shoulder in a column, four men abreast and singing Deutschland uber Alles. It was crazy. The human cost meant nothing to them. So the Allies aren't going to be making this stuff up. And Robert Cowdi says, what's going on here? He says, these are not blokes who are singing because they're suffused with a kind of Viking spirit to give their lives for their country. Actually, what's happened is these are volunteers who Falkenhayn has thrown into the sort of the meat grinder. They have been very hastily trained, then rushed to the front. They are not really ready for what's coming at them. They're overwhelmed by the horror of it. They're probably singing for two reasons. One, to keep panic at bay, to kind of desperately try to keep their spirits up. And number two, because the weather has changed, it's become very rainy and very foggy and they're singing, as a lot of units did on all sides, to identify themselves to other units, so they're not shot by friendly fire. So in other words, this is not really a story about great melodramatic patriotic enthusiasm. It's a one that expresses the terror and confusion of young men at the front. Now the other thing Robert Cowley says is, first of all, it's probable a lot of them are not singing Deutschland Uber Alles. They're probably singing the song that Hitler mentions at the beginning of that passage, which is Die Wacht am Rhein, the Watch on the Rhine. That was the most popular German marching song. And the other thing, they're not children, they're not even students. Only one in five of these volunteers were students. They're actually just ordinary Germans. We'll come back to why they start to be referred to as students. Finally, it doesn't happen at Langemarck. Why does the story end up being located here and here? Cowdi has this brilliant explanation which is just so simple. He says in German to a German ear, most of these other villages have very unglamorous names. So Bikshuta doesn't sound like a place for a kind of Wagnerian self immolation, But Langemarck does. He quotes a former volunteer who was writing in 1933 who said of Langemarck, the name sounds like a heroic legend. So in other words, the story was placed here because it sounded really good. So how does the story come to play such a massive part in German propaganda? Obviously, the colossal loss of life is an important bit of the context. But there are two things about Ypres in particular. Number one, more than any other battle in 1914, this feels like a total waste of lives, because Falkenhayn has thrown thousands of men basically into the inferno and they haven't broken through.
- [39:23]
And this will become the prototype for the First World War battle that endures to this day. This image of mass slaughter that serves no purpose at all.
- [39:32]
Exactly. Because if you think about all the battles we've talked about so far, Mons or the Battle of the Frontiers, or, you know, Lecato or especially the Marne, people are moving quite a lot. You know, the front line is ebbing and flowing right quite quickly, but here the front line is stuck and people are sort of charging and they're being shot down, and then the next day they're trying again. And this is going to be the theme, isn't it, till 1918.
- [39:57]
But for the British, they have not yet picked up on this theme because presumably for them, Ypres is a thermopylae that holds.
- [40:06]
Yeah, it's defensive.
- [40:07]
It's a defensive battle in which the defenders are massively outnumbered and yet the overwhelming force of the attackers can't break through. So is it the Somme that teaches them the lesson that the Germans have already learned in 1914?
- [40:20]
I think so. I think if you talk to a lot of British military historians now, they will say that basically what happens in the next few years is a learning curve. And the French finally figure it out in 1918, they win. But it takes a long time to get to that point. Going back to Ypres, the impact of that slaughter falls disproportionately on the Germans and on their reserve divisions of their young volunteers, divisions which actually end up losing about half their men. So as these stories go back to Germany, the newspapers in Germany are craving a bit of good news. A story that gives their sacrifice a deeper meaning. So a story that will both inspire the men who are still in the trenches, but it will also reassure people back home. And so that is why this idea of the sacrifice at Langemarck has such traction on the first anniversary of when this is supposed to have happened, which is the 10th of November. So in 1915, all the German papers celebrated the Day of Langemarck and they said it should become a national day of remembrance. Of course, the irony is that it's the next day, the 11th, that in the long run, becomes the Day of remembrance across Europe. And once Germany lose the war in 1918, the idea of the Kindermort becomes incredibly powerful because it fits perfectly with the Stab in the Back legend. So it's our brave boys went singing into battle, but in the long run, they were betrayed. By Communists and Jews and Social Democrats and, you know, civilian politicians and so on.
- [41:48]
So in this idea of it is a massacre of the innocents, it's not so much the British who are playing the part of Herod in this narrative, it's the evil, I suppose the Jews, most obviously, because Herod was Jewish, but the guys back home who were profiteering.
- [42:04]
Yeah, I think so in the long run, Certainly by the 1920s, when this story is being told, it's not an Anglophobic story. In other words, the British are just doing their job, firing their machine guns, but the real villains are the people who betrayed these young men. I think that's absolutely part of it. So in the 1920s, it's very popular with veterans groups like the Steel Helmets, nationalistic veterans groups, but also student groups who, as we know, are also very nationalistic in the 1920s and 30s. And it's given extra oomph by two things. So, first of all, in 1922, the Deutschland lied. Deutschland, Deutschland was adopted as the anthem of the Weimar Republic. Before this, this had not been the German anthem. The German anthem was something called Heil die im Siegerkrantz Hail to thee with the Victor's Crown. It was a kind of imperial anthem. And then in 1932, a huge German cemetery with more than 44,000 bodies was dedicated at Langemarck. 1932, of course, we know what's going to happen the following year. The advent of the Third Reich. And for Hitler and the Nazis, this story, it just seemed brilliant. It ticked every box for them. Youth, patriotism, struggle, sacrifice. And the point about the student element is that students are such an important part of Hitler's coalition. Students love the Nazis, they can't wait to do a book burning. So when the Nazis get in this story, this one moment becomes, dare I say, a sacral date.
- [43:34]
I think you absolutely can, yeah. In the Nazi religion. And I suppose also the fact that Hitler had been a participant in the first battle of Ypres, I mean, it sanctifies him with the memory of these soldiers who had died.
- [43:50]
I mean, who can say whether Hitler was ever in an offensive where people sang songs? Well, I mean, it's perfectly plausible that he could have been. And, I mean, there is a degree of cynicism to this, but I think if you had asked him, if you'd had been having tea with a Fuhrer like your mate, what's her name, Unity Mitford, then he would have said that it did happen and he would probably have believed that it happened even if it didn't. You know, he'd have convinced himself that he was part of. It would be part of his personal mythology of his involvement in the First World War, which plays such a huge part in his psychology. Anyway, from 1933, this was the day in which students were traditionally inducted into the Nazi Party. 10 November, and every member of the Hitler Youth had to pay a levy called the Langemarck Pfennig the Langemarck Penny. Robert Cowley, in his article quotes a Nazi propagandist. National Socialism and Langemarck are one and the same. So to go back to 1914, when people find out you're a historian and the subject of the First World War comes up, people often ask this question, why did they carry on? Why at the end of 1914, didn't they just all stop and agree to go home? And I think this story actually in some ways helps to answer that, because the point is, the scale of the slaughter and the sacrifice makes it harder to stop the war because you've sacrificed so many young men that it has to mean something. You know, it can't all have been for nothing. The sacrifice must have been worth some kind of existential goal. The other thing I think about this question is that it's actually based on a false premise, which is that when people ask, why on earth did they keep going, the implication is, didn't they realize at this point that it was all for nothing, that it was all futile? I think you used the word futile earlier, didn't you, when you were saying about the perception of futile attacks and a futile war and stuff. But the French and the Germans are the two most heavily committed countries. They don't think it's futile at all. So if you're French, right, at this point, end of 1914, you haven't got Alsace and Lorraine back. And what's worse, the Germans have taken another tenth of your territory. They've taken a sixth of your manufacturing industry. They've taken all of your iron and steel. They've got 8 million acres of your most fertile farmland. Of course you're not going to stop. You know, it's like saying to the Ukrainians, why don't you stop? Of course you're not going to stop when they've got your territory. And as for the Germans, they went into this thinking this was life or death, right? That's what Moltke thought. It's what the Kaiser thought, it's what Bethelman Hollweg thought.
- [46:18]
And so they still think that.
- [46:19]
Of course they still think it. A lot of people have died. They've got the French and the Russians in arms on both sides of them. They think, well, of course we're not going to just go home, because actually, you know, Tom, we know what happens when they lost.
- [46:30]
Yeah, it wasn't good. Yeah.
- [46:32]
So they're thinking, of course we've got to keep going and try to win somehow. But of course, what they all know now is that this is going to be very long and very brutal. So you mentioned this already in the American football. So American listeners will enjoy this. They have a saying that defense wins championships, and this is true of the First World War as much as it is of their ludicrous game. Because if you attack, right, the lesson of the Schlieffen plan is you will probably outrun your supply lines, you'll get exhausted, and then you'll be vulnerable. And actually, even in a small scale, if you attack, you'll probably end up stuck on some barbed wire being riddled with machine gun bullets while a shell lands on your head. So, in other words, both sides are basically, well, we're going to have to fight a kind of defensive strategy. They're digging in deep trenches, sandbags, all this kind of thing. And for older commanders who've known different kinds of war, this is a real shock. So Kitchener said a few months later, I just don't know what is to be done. This isn't war. As I understand it. You could say, oh, ha ha, you know, look at this old man, completely clapped out and antiquated. But that's very unfair. He was born in 1850. He'd fought in Egypt and in the Sudan.
- [47:43]
He'd won the battle of Omdurman, hadn't he?
- [47:45]
He had. How could he possibly know? How could you possibly work out, you know, with that experience, how you're going to win a war like this, which is unprecedented?
- [47:54]
I mean, I suppose if the Mahdi had had machine guns as well, might.
- [47:58]
Have been a different story.
- [47:59]
It might have been a different story and he might have had time to think about it.
- [48:02]
Do you know what? Every podcast we ever do is in danger of degenerating into a podcast about General Gordon.
- [48:06]
I know, he's always lurking in the background.
- [48:08]
Yes, he lives rent free in our heads, as the youngsters say. Right, so we started with the Germans, let's end with them. Now you might expect them to be completely despondent because they've been told all this time that the Schiefen Moltke plan is the only way they're going to win. On the upside they're entrenched in French and Belgian territory, they can stay where they are, they can focus on defence. And their hope obviously is that the Entente, that the Allies will wear themselves out and attacking them and eventually will come to the negotiating table. But the Germans really do need that to happen quite soon, probably in the next year or so.
- [48:41]
So just a question, if this had happened, say the French and the British had opened negotiations, if they'd said, look, this is hopeless, we're all going to bleed to death, what terms do you think might have been arrived at?
- [48:53]
It's just an impossible question, isn't it?
- [48:55]
Do you think that to sue for terms would have been a kind of admission of defeat?
- [48:59]
I think so. If you go to the negotiator, say, please, can we talk about this? You look weak, don't you?
- [49:05]
Well, I just. Whether you frame it and saying, look, you know, we are spilling the blood of young men across Europe, there is no way out of this. You know, it's like a, it's like abandoning a test match where you can't force a victory to use the kind of thing that Lionel Tennyson would have said.
- [49:22]
But here's the thing, Tom, we mentioned Ukraine earlier on, right, and there's lots of talk right now when we're recording this. You know, people are always saying, should they have a ceasefire, should they, blah, blah, blah. Ukrainians would say, the Russians are in possession of quite a bit of our territory, we'll talk to them when we've got rid of them, basically. Why should we just agree to stop?
- [49:39]
Well, that's the key question, isn't it? Would the Germans have been willing to withdraw, say from German held France?
- [49:48]
So this is the thing, I think the French would say, we're not prepared to talk to these guys until they get out of our territory. And the Germans would say, well, why would we get out of the territory when this is the one card that we have? So I think it's difficult to imagine how those talks really. I certainly don't think there's going to be Franco German talks. I mean, again, the British are pretty committed at this point, I think.
- [50:08]
Well, they've lost a lot of men as well.
- [50:11]
The problem is, has all that sacrifice been for nothing? How on earth are you going to sell that to your population to say, tens, hundreds of thousands of men? But actually we've all made a bit of a mistake. I think that's a, that's really hard to imagine, but it would have been.
- [50:25]
The best thing to do.
- [50:26]
Well, it would have been. And of course, later in the war in particular, there are people who start to make this case, right? There are quite brave people who say, come on, I'm not sure this persisting with this is the right idea, but in 1914, I don't think there's any serious possibility of it happening. The interesting thing actually, Tom, is that somebody who agrees with you to some degree is Erich von Falkenhayn. So on the 18th of November, basically when the Ypres lost, he said to the German chancellor, Bethven Hollweg, he said, I don't think we can win this on the battlefield and we should start thinking about a political solution. And Falkenhayn's idea was that basically you choose one of Russia or France, ideally Russia, and you strike a separate peace with them. And he said, and I quote, and he's totally right. If Russia, France and England hold together, we cannot defeat them in such a way as to achieve acceptable peace terms. We're more likely to be slowly exhausted. That, of course, is exactly what happens. But Beth van Hollweg says no. And he says no for two reasons. Number one, he says, how on earth would we sell this to the German people? They will never stand for it in a million years. It'd be political, it'd be suicide for the entire governing elite of Germany. And secondly, Bethmann Hohlweg is looking to the east because on the Eastern front, the war has been unfolding very differently. This has been. There's not trenches. It's a story of these huge armies wandering across this huge landscape of grasslands and marshes. And the front lines are always changing.
- [51:54]
So it's a kind of Great Northern War.
- [51:56]
It is much more Great Northern War. And on the Eastern front, the Germans have found two new heroes who they think might hold the key to victory. And these people are Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. They are the victors of the Battle of Tannenberg. And to anyone who knows about the rise of the Nazis, they are very, very familiar names. And Tom, we will be telling their story next time. Okay?
- [52:22]
Well, members of the Rest Is History Club can hear those episodes right now, of course, and if you'd like to join them. If you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club already, then you can sign up@therestishistory.com but for now be.
- [53:02]
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